How Jenkins® Works
Jenkins operates as a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) automation server, helping developers build, test, and deploy applications efficiently. At its core, Jenkins follows a pipeline-driven approach:
Source Code Integration: Developers commit code changes to a repository (e.g., GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket).
Automated Builds: Jenkins detects changes and triggers an automated build process.
Testing & Verification: Unit tests, integration tests, and security scans ensure code quality before deployment.
Deployment: Successful builds move into deployment, whether it's a staging environment or production.
Jenkins uses plugins to integrate with various tools, making it highly adaptable to different development and deployment workflows.
Jenkins CI/CD: Automating the Software Development Lifecycle
Jenkins is one of the most widely used CI/CD tools because of its flexibility and scalability.
Continuous Integration (CI): Automates the merging of code changes, ensuring developers work with an up-to-date codebase.
Continuous Delivery (CD): Ensures that software is always in a deployable state, reducing manual intervention.
Continuous Deployment: Expands on CD by automatically pushing updates to production environments.
With Jenkins Pipelines, teams can define custom workflows as code, improving reliability and reducing errors in the software delivery process.
Jenkins History
The Jenkins project was started in 2004 (originally called Hudson) by Kohsuke Kawaguchi, while he worked for Sun Microsystems. Kohsuke was a developer at Sun and got tired of incurring the wrath of his team every time his code broke the build. He created Jenkins as a way to perform continuous integration – that is, to test his code before he did an actual commit to the repository, to be sure all was well. Once his teammates saw what he was doing, they all wanted to use Jenkins. Kohsuke open sourced it, creating the Jenkins project, and soon Jenkins usage had spread around the world.
Jenkins Today
Originally developed by Kohsuke for continuous integration (CI), today Jenkins orchestrates the entire software delivery pipeline – called continuous delivery. For some organizations automation extends even further, to continuous deployment. Continuous delivery (CD), coupled with a DevOps culture, dramatically accelerates the delivery of software.
Jenkins is the most widely adopted solution for continuous delivery, thanks to its extensibility and a vibrant, active community. The Jenkins community offers more than 1,700 plugins that enable Jenkins to integrate with virtually any tool, including all of the best-of-breed solutions used throughout the continuous delivery process. Jenkins continues to grow as the dominant solution for software process automation, continuous integration and continuous delivery and, as of February 2018, there are more than 165,000 active installations and an estimated 1.65 million users around the world.
Pros and Cons of Jenkins
Advantages:
Open-Source and Free: No licensing costs, making it accessible to all developers.
Extensive Plugin Ecosystem: Over 1,800 plugins allow integrations with DevOps tools, cloud services, and deployment platforms.
Scalability: Supports distributed builds across multiple nodes for efficient execution.
Flexibility: Works with various languages, frameworks, and environments.
Strong Community Support: A vast community of developers contributes to improvements and troubleshooting.
Disadvantages:
Complex Configuration: Requires significant setup, especially for enterprise environments.
Maintenance Overhead: Jenkins instances need frequent updates, monitoring, and plugin management.
Performance Bottlenecks: Large-scale Jenkins deployments can face slowdowns if not properly optimized.
Security Risks: Open-source nature requires careful security management to prevent vulnerabilities.
How CloudBees Can Help Scale Jenkins for the Enterprise
While Jenkins is a powerful tool, scaling it for enterprise use requires additional security, reliability, and governance features—this is where CloudBees comes in.
Enterprise-Grade Security & Compliance: CloudBees provides enhanced authentication, access control, and auditing capabilities.
Scalability & Performance Optimization: CloudBees Jenkins can handle large workloads across distributed infrastructures.
Automated Governance & Policy Enforcement: Enterprises can set up rules to ensure compliance with security and regulatory standards.
Cloud-Native & Hybrid Support: CloudBees integrates with AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and on-premises environments.
Expert Support & Managed Services: CloudBees offers 24/7 support, ensuring the smooth operation of business-critical applications.
CloudBees and the Jenkins Community
CloudBees is an active participant in the Jenkins community and plays a significant role in supporting the project. A number of key contributors to the Jenkins project are employed by CloudBees. In support of the community, CloudBees is the lead sponsor of DevOps World
Engineers from the CloudBees support and product teams regularly contribute code to the Jenkins project, are active in Jenkins chats and project meetings, and contribute to the Jenkins project mailing lists. Additionally, all fixes made by CloudBees in the open source code are contributed back to the project – which helps us all to enjoy an ever-higher quality Jenkins experience.
Jenkins and the Continuous Delivery Foundation
In 2019, the Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF) was launched operating under the umbrella of the Linux Foundation. CloudBees led the launch initiative, in collaboration with the Jenkins, Google, the Linux Foundation, and more.
The CDF is focused on developing, nurturing and promoting open source projects, best practices and industry specifications related to continuous delivery. The CDF houses a variety of open source projects, including Jenkins, Jenkins X, Spinnaker and Tekton. Additional projects are expected to join, with the goal of bringing together a continuous delivery (CD) ecosystem to build specifications and projects around portability and interoperability. CloudBees participates as a founding member and contributes technologies and resources to the project on an ongoing basis
Additional Resources
Visit the community at jenkins.io
Level up your Jenkins skills with various video on CloudBeesTV